in art, as in higher matters, “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it;” and the initial cause of failure, in many who seem to have faculties which should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty of the road which leads to it, as want of humility in confessing its narrowness. each man is by birth a unique individuality, which the circumstances of his life will increase and develop continually, if he be content to do his duty in the station, intellectual and otherwise, to which it has pleased god to call him, without falling below its obligations or assuming others which have not been laid upon him. the low but still priceless degree of genius which consists in individuality in manners, and which renders the possessor of it powerfully though imperceptibly edifying in all companies, is open to all, though few are sufficiently simple and honest and{68} unambitious to attain to it, by turning neither to the right hand nor the left in pursuit of their particular good of life.
“originality,” whether in manners, action, or art, consists simply in a man’s being upon his own line; in his advancing with a single mind towards his unique apprehension of good; and in his doing so in harmony with the universal laws which secure to all men the liberty of doing as he is doing, without hindrance from his or any other’s individuality. unless “originality” thus works in submission to and harmony with general law, it loses its nature. in morals it becomes sin or insanity, in manners and in art oddity and eccentricity, which are in reality the extreme opposites and travesties of originality. as in religion it is said that “no man can know whether he is worthy of love,” so in art and ordinary life no man can know whether he is original. if through habitual fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to originality, he will be the last person in the world to know it. if he thinks he is original, he is probably not so; and if he is commonly praised for originality, he may hardly hope to attain to any such distinction. originality never expresses itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities. a society of persons of true originality in manners would be like an oak-tree, the leaves of which all{69} look alike until they are carefully compared, when it is found that they are all different. in art, the sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the same absence of strongly pronounced distinctions, and therefore the same withdrawal from the recognition of the vulgar, who look for originality in antics, oddities, crudities, and incessant violations of the universal laws, which true originality religiously observes; its very function consisting, as it does, in upholding those laws and illustrating them and making them unprecedentedly attractive by its own peculiar emphases and modulations.
the individuality or “genius” of a man, which results from fidelity in life and art to his “ruling love,” is almost necessarily narrow. shakespeare is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has even approached to universality. his range is so great that ordinary readers, if, like mr. frederic harrison, they had the courage to speak their impressions, would with him condemn the greater part of his work as “rubbish”—that is, as having no counterpart in the “positivism” of their actual or imaginative experience. every play of shakespeare is a new vision—not only a new aspect of his vision, as is the case with the different works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest. narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed to{70} greatness in art, is often its condition. dante and wordsworth are proofs that greatness of genius consists in seeing clearly rather than much; and well it would have been both for poets and for readers had the former always or even generally understood the economy of moving always on their own lines. nothing has so much injured modern art as the artist’s ambition to show off his “breadth”; and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to forsake his line for the production of exceedingly mortal epics or tragedies. the modern custom of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at a time affords proof which every one will understand of what has been said. who, with an eye for each painter’s true quality, can have gone over the collections in recent years of the pictures of landseer, reynolds, rossetti, blake, holman hunt, and others, without a feeling of surprise, and some perhaps irrational disappointment, at the discovery for the first time of the artist’s limitations? each had painted the same vision over and over again! there was no harm in that. the mistake was in bringing together the replicas which should have adorned “palace chambers far apart.” but poets, whose “works” are always collectively exhibited, should beware how they betray the inevitable fact of the narrowness of genius. not only should they{71} never leave their own line for another which is not their own, but they should be equally careful not to go over it again when they have once got to the end of it.
